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November 19, 2007

Two most (Ab)Used words of 2007

The year 2007 has seen a lot of changes from an economic standpoint for various countries in various ways. The United States has seen a fall in the USD value while the Euro has shown a steady growth. India and China have been showing tremendous progress in the Asia Pacific.

With the economic boom, most of the countries have been wanting to ride on the wave to possibly create newer markets. This has resulted in the usage and creation of a lot of buzzwords. Some created them, while the rest have used (and abused) them.

"Innovation" has been topping the list so far. This word was mostly used by the CxO commuity (especially CEOs) in an attempt to redefine/ realign various areas of business (viz., strategy, finance, infrastructure, etc). With obvious reasons, there got created a lot of areas in the Line of Businesses where roles were created to focus on Innovation. Remember, this is the case with the biggies like IBM, Microsoft, Airtel, and the like.

This has though seen a lot of other players use the "Innovation" buzzword to attract customers and market mind share. For example, there are companies in the IT services sectors, which have started to use the "Innovation" buzzword in their services offerings. But if one really takes a closer look into the history of their operations and approach to even a year back, they would find nothing significantly different except the use of the "Innovation" buzzword. I'm not trying to generalize this to all companies! Its just a set of them.

The second (ab)used word is the acronym "SOA". This word "SOA" stands for Service Oriented Architecture. This is a very key architectural approach, but has been construed by many people in the sales area as a "single entity or a sellable product". The technical community have focussed on the "SOA" buzzword so much, that they have started to forget the underlying programming languages and constructs that help create an SOA.

There was a person whom I "almost interviewed" the other day, as he claimed to have worked on SOA. This apprised me to the fact that the IT junkies whose resumes one time read "J2EE Expert", today reads "SOA Expert"! This is the height of (ab)use.

With the growth in market and oceans of opportunities being created, I'm sure we will witness many more such buzzwords being created. Its imperative to nail down this kind of usage and help the world clearly understand what these buzzwords really mean.